


Spin Cycle

by omphale23



Series: Personal Pineapples [9]
Category: Life, Standoff
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-21
Updated: 2010-03-21
Packaged: 2017-10-08 04:51:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/72876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/pseuds/omphale23
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dirty Laundry. No, really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spin Cycle

Charlie never does the laundry.

Matt doesn't notice it for months, but Charlie's dirty clothing disappears regularly and returns clean, folded, perfectly unobjectionable and finished by the service he uses to do all the other cleaning in the house. None of it smells like the bottle of soap in the laundry room, the one that was there the first time Charlie took him through the house, the bottle that never gets any emptier and never gets replaced.

When he notices, he doesn't ask. Ted has his own laundry supplies, kept in a cupboard out of the way, but Charlie—he doesn't even enter the room, just opens the door that one time, waves his arm around, and then pulls it shut and pretends that soiled laundry simply doesn't exist. That, like magic, dirty things become clean and old things are replaced and socks always match and appear in drawers like tiny gifts from the apparel fairies.

Matt supposes that for him, laundry really doesn't matter. That laundry is another thing left behind in Pelican Bay, a remnant of Charlie's former life that he didn't choose to keep.

He can't help pushing against Charlie's walls, trying to find a way inside, and so when Matt moves in for real, he opens the bottle of laundry soap and pulls out their clothes—jumbled together, socks and pants and shirts that maybe Matt wore, maybe Charlie did—and starts the washer. He's standing there, watching the colors spin round and round, when Charlie gets home from work and wanders past.

Charlie's trying to be casual, to pretend that he wasn't looking for Matt to make sure that he hadn't vanished like a promise, but when he stops to lean against the doorframe his fingers are tapping a nervous rhythm on the wood that Matt can barely hear, and he clears his throat a few times. Matt doesn't move.

"You're using my soap." Matt nods his head, keeps watching the spin-rise-fall-splash of clothing. It's soothing. "That's okay. I wasn't using it. Someone should use it, because maybe soap expires, maybe it goes bad and stops being soapy, like—"

Matt steps back, close enough to feel Charlie behind him, tense and waiting. "Shut up, you're babbling." Charlie takes a deep breath. "Cancel the laundry service, okay? We can do this. This is not the same, Charlie, this is what people do. It's just a laundry room. It's just a room in this house and it's yours—it's ours, we should use it." Charlie doesn't answer, and Matt lets it go for the moment.

They stand there quietly, listening to the hum of the washer until it's done, until Matt walks away to move the clothes over to the dryer. Charlie doesn't follow him, not yet.


End file.
